Portico Quartet

Product Description

2012 release from the British Jazz/World outfit. Portico Quartet still sound like nothing you ever heard before. The Mercury nominated East London based outfit's unique music has expanded to embrace new sonic territories. Drawing on the inspiration of Electronica, Ambient, Classical, World and Dance music as they take their strange, beautiful, cinematic, future music to exciting new vistas where the inspiration of Burial, Mount Kimbie, Radiohead and Flying Lotus rubs shoulders with the textures of Arve Henriksen and Bon Iver and echoes of Steve Reich and Max Richter. But all underpinned by a shared joy in collective music making as the band push their inimitable music into the future. Produced by the band themselves and brilliantly engineered by Greg Freeman at the Fish Market & Real World Studios, Portico Quartet's eponymous third album is the sound of a band that refuses to stand still.

Review

...densely rhythmic pieces. Grooves and textures build into moody dreamscapes on which electronica mixes with the hypnotic churn of systems music. It all amounts to the foursome's most involving album yet. --The Times (UK)

This is a positively dangerous album. The moves further into ambient and electronic based music have taken the fascinating half-classical/half-jazz sound of the band into deeply hypnotic and completely enveloping new territory. ...I simply could not put it away. It is brilliant, in the same way that a diamond is brilliant - it shines and shimmers and your brain pulsates trying to follow all the different musical lights. --Music-news.com

Portico's message is clear from the pulsating opener, Window Seat, with its lazy, swerving long notes for bowed bass and electronic strings...The smoky melody to the ensuing Ruins makes Jack Wyllie's sax more like a stringed instrument crossed with a trumpet, its quivering vibrato spooky... Snappy groovers with chattery percussion patterns underpin cinematic sax themes. With its simple stick-clicking and sombre piano turning to foreboding electronic patterns around Dahlgren's childlike tones, Sleepless is a triumph. Portico have found a contemporary sound to thrill their fans and attract new listeners. --The Guardian (UK)